Through my long history of visits to see Mom and Bill in Wallace, Idaho (since 2003), this past weekend's visit yielded more photos than any since 2007. For basically the same reason, I am calling this past weekend's massive, 133-shot photo album on Flickr "Inland Northwest 2020," the first time I have called one of these photo albums "Inland Northwest," rather than just "Wallace" or "Wallace Family Get Together, since "Inland Northwest May 2016," because it includes stops at other places besides just Wallace, but part of the same trip.

"Inland Northwest 2005" (117 shots) included a visit to Pullman, where I graduated college, with Shobhit; along with our first trip up the gondola in Kellogg. "Idaho 2006" (105 shots) included a lunch with Barbara, her friend Barb, and a couple of her other friends in Spokane, as well as taking Mom and Bill up that same gondola. "Inland Northwest 2007" still has the record number of shots in this collection (182), mostly because that was the visit when we took Mom and Bill on a day trip to Glacier National Park in Montana—but that visit also included a stop by Christopher and Katina's house in Deer Park north of Spokane; one of the mine tours in Wallace; and a stop by Dry Falls State Park along Highway 2 in Eastern Washington on our way back home. "Inland Northwest 2009 (84 shots) included another stop in Deer Park on our way to Wallace, as well as a brief excursion with Mom and Bill over to the 50,000 Silver Dollars Casino/Restaurant/Motel in Montana. "Inland Northwest 2010" (55 shots) and Inland Northwest May 2016 (75 shots) are so named because they were combined with joint trips with Dad and Sherri to see Christopher and the kids in Spokane.

But, only behind the trip that included Glacier National Park in 2007, "Inland Northwest 2020" has the second-highest number of shots of all these photo albums (at 133), because of a different approach to adding very photogenic stops during the trip: two state parks each way, to get our money's worth out of the Washington State Parks Discover Pass that I hardly never got to use as planned during my Birth Week (I'll get another one next year); as well as a scenic forest hike just outside of Wallace.

There's also the twin issues this time around, of both Mom not being here anymore; and COVID-19 preventing any family visits indoors anywhere—we couldn't even play Cards Against Humanity to honor Mom's memory, as then we would all be touching the same cards. So I didn't even bring those, although I would have loved to. Still, this had a surprisingly pleasant side effect: it gave Shobhit and me a lot more time than usual to find things to do on our own even when we were in Wallace. It's been many years since we've done that, as usually we sit inside the house and hang out for many hours. This time, we had roughly two hours with Christopher and Tristen (and, very briefly and at a far greater distance, Bill) for our outdoor pizza dinner Saturday night; and then about four hours over an outdoor sandwiches lunch at our hotel on Sunday. The rest of the time, Shobhit and I were on our own.

And honestly, we had a very good time. I did not have time even to upload the photos to Flickr until this morning, so I am way behind on captioning them and hope to get the photo digest email written up and sent out later this evening. But, all the photos are tagged at least, and eventually you'll still have to rely on the photos for detail in captions rather than getting it all here, as I barely have time to do this as it is. But, I will still share photos from each of our major stops:

Lake Easton State Park

Lake Easton State Park was very pretty, and a great first stop, less than 90 minutes' drive out from home—even less than that from Issaquah, barely more than an hour, after we stopped for gas at the Costco there. We spent a little while walking trails around the lake, making it maybe a quarter around it, including to the "Palouse to Cascades State Park Trail" that stretches all the way to the Palouse Region of Eastern Washington, and which we briefly stopped at where it meets the Columbia River on the way back. That trail passes by right along the south side of Lake Easton.

Potholes State Park

When it comes to state parks in Eastern Washington that are anywhere near I-90, especially between Vantage and Spokane, it's pretty slim pickings—and Potholes State Park, south of Moses Lake, was the best option. If we ever do this again with stops at state parks, we'll probably want to drive Highway 2 again. In this case, we still had to bypass I-90 briefly as soon as we crossed the Columbia River via the Vantage Bridge, briefly driving via Highway 26—and turning right instead of left after the bridge across the river, something I only ever used to do when returning to college in Pullman. (Indeed, the last time I drove this direction would have been when Shobhit and I went to Pullman in 2005). Only here, we zigzagged after not too long to find ourselves at this state park on Potholes Reservoir.

The park was . . . all right. Very different from Lake Easton, which is in the Cascades, and this is in desert land. Well, we can check it off our list and I got a few interesting pictures.

Pizza Dinner on Blanket Totes in Wallace

And in fact, even with those two state park stops, we made surprisingly good time on our drive over there, stopped to shop and fill up gas at the Costco in Coeur d'Alene, and still arriving at the Hercules Inn in Wallace right around 5 p.m. (having left home suitably early, around 8:45 in the morning), and then getting over there with the pizzas we picked up at the Coeur d'Alene Costco by 6:00. We set out three blanket totes in the grass by the empty lot next to Mom and Bill's house; Shobhit and I sat on one, and Christopher and Tristen each sat on their own. Shobhit brought wine and chocolate as well from Total Wine & More, and Christopher had some of both (Tristen only had chocolate, though we did offer him wine, which he declined).

I had been afraid this visit might trigger emotions coming from unexpected places, but that really never happened, even though Christopher and I talked plenty about Mom, and some about the events leading up to her death, and how Bill fit into all that, and how he's been dealing. I guess he spends most of his time in the bedroom playing an online game, which is really no different from before. Both Christopher and Tristen said Bill doesn't talk much about Mom, although he has slightly more recently, particularly with Tristen. Tristen said Bill told him he cried the other night.

It's entirely possible I might have been more likely to be emotionally triggered had I spent any time inside the house, but I didn't—not at all, actually. We even had our masks handy to use should we need to go inside to use the bathroom, but we were there all of two hours or so, and the need never came up. I did nearly go inside at one point to bring in some of the food we left for them, but I wound up just handing it to Tristen to take inside.

As it happens, it was quite warm in the Idaho Panhandle over the weekend, with highs near 90° in Wallace, but as Christopher noted, being surrounded by mountains, Wallace is in shadow well before sunset and it cools down pretty well in the evening. So sitting out there Saturday evening, the weather was quite lovely, and was almost certainly more pleasant than it ever would have been sitting inside that house I always thought was way too dark anyway.

Picnic Lunch at Hercules Inn

As I had already stated I would, we would approach this visit with the very same routine we've had for about three years now, just modified slightly due to the pandemic: stop for pizzas at Costco in Coeur d'Alene to eat at the house for dinner the night we arrive; then invite them over to our hotel for lunch the next day.

Usually Nikki and TJ come with Cheyanna to join us for this, and often Christopher's youngest boys, Christian and Braeden, are there too. The boys were not there this weekend, though, and unfortunately for timing, this just happened to be the week Nikki and TJ went to D.C. to visit friends who live there for a week—even though virus spread there is high enough lately that just last week the mayor said any visitors would have to self-quarantine for 14 days. That's clearly not super enforceable, though, and now that Nikki has posted some photos of their trip to Facebook, predictably they were all at outdoor landmarks and monuments, of which D.C. has plenty. They clearly would never be able to go into any of the many awesome, otherwise free museums around the National Mall, so they'll probably want to go back again when circumstances are better. Still: they did fly there, with a four-year-old, in Peak Pandemic. Yeesh.

But, for our own purposes, as much as I missed them, it was for the best, as it kept our "gathering" number to the very minimum that it should be under the circumstances. I had thought we would need to spread out the blanket totes again, this time on the grass around the hot tub outside the Hercules Inn, but the other unit on the upper floor was unoccupied and there was a small table on the landing outside the two doors, so we just put the whole spread there and ate and visited in chairs around that table, spread apart, for about four hours. In the past for this lunch we did a lot more actual cooking, but to make things easier for several reasons this time we just had a couple of salads in addition to supplies to make sandwiches. Shobhit and I made our own inside and let Christopher and Tristen make their own at that table. You can see we still had plenty of food available, including pretzels and chips and salsa.

Christopher did bring me my copy of Mom's death certificate when they came by for lunch on Sunday, and that was the only moment the entire trip that came even close to "visiting Mom." I did ask Christopher on Saturday night if I could see the ashes, and he said they were in a box in Bill's bedroom, in a tone that sort of suggested it was an imposition (maybe to Bill?) to go and get it. I could have pushed on this issue—hell, I paid for the fucking cremation—but, I decided to just let it go.

As it was, we just had another very nice visit. We told them to come by at about 1:00 and they arrived about 15 minutes before that, so Shobhit and I were still finishing setting everything up. On Saturday Shobhit kind of tried to push for earlier, trying to argue that it would mean getting to spend more time together, but the four hours we got as it was worked just fine. Christopher and Tristen headed home probably around 4:40, which left the rest of the day for Shobhit and me to find something to do, which I did not want to spend just sitting in the hotel room watching TV.

Oh, one other side note: hotel cleaning employees did pass us a few times while we ate lunch, to clean the other, unoccupied unit. We saw at least three people, only one of whom ever bothered to put on a mask. and often there were two of them inside the unit at once. A lot of people in Idaho are clearly still not taking all of this seriously, which is insane.

Pulaski Trail

So, anyway. What I really wanted was to find a place along one of the several streams and creeks around Wallace where we could wade in and get our feet way, but Wallace is so secluded that it's difficult to find any recommendations online. Apparently Christopher and Bill's longtime neighbor Lyman not long ago took them to a swimming hole, but Christopher couldn't remember where it was. Lyman had even come by briefly Saturday night to show off his new Harley, but the topic of swimming had not come up by then.

I did do a quick search of images on Flickr, looking for the names of some of the creeks around, and found a very pretty spot that looked at least wade-able, on Placer Creek. It was tagged on Flickr as "Pulaski Trail," so we went driving in a direction we had never driven before, just outside Wallace to the south, and found the trail head.

We got about three quarters of the way into this trail that apparently ends at some tunnel ("Pulaski Tunnel"), which goes in about a mile and three quarters, when Shobhit became convinced something had bitten his foot and he may have been poisoned. This was plainly paranoid hogwash from the start, but combining that with the sun starting to go down, I agreed to walk back out of the trail, and we'll try it again maybe next year earlier in the day and when we had on hiking shoes rather than sandals. I still got plenty of great photos, and you can see it was a very lush and serene place. I'm still glad we went out there.

My sandwich at lunch had been so unexpectedly huge, Shobhit and I both had cut ours in half and had the second half for dinner.

Mount Spokane State Park

This one was the biggest adventure yesterday, our first stop on our way back home, and nearly an hour drive out of the way, off I-90 and to the north—Mount Spokane State Park, which, incredibly, I had not been to. We even drove all the way to the summit, even though the last couple of miles narrows the road considerably, has no side rails, and is a very steep drop-off to the side. Shobhit had been driving and he began to panic, especially after getting onto that last stretch which made it very clear we could never turn around until we got to the loop at the top. It switchbacks a couple of times before getting there, and I offered to drive the rest of the way just so he would calm down.

I won't lie, it was slightly scary even to me—just nothing compared to Shobhit's panic. I was fine so long as I kept my eyes fixed on the road and never over at the view as we approached the summit at slightly more than 5,000 feet. Once we did reach there, I was so glad we did—I even told Shobhit, I know it was scary for him and certainly he'll never elect to do it again, but I'm sure glad we did this once. The view from up there was no less spectacular than that from the gondola peak in Kellogg, and I had no idea any such thing existed so close to Spokane itself. I got many great photos, and then we started heading back down, including a stop at a picnic table once we were back below that scariest road, to have the last of the leftover pizza for brunch.

But, we had the somewhat unfortunate detour after that. Or, not so much a detour as a delay. Shobhit ran out of coolant in the car as he drove us down the winding road off the mountain, and before we were even out of the park, he parked in a parking lot to check under the hood because of the burning we were smelling. He would not drive it any further without coolant, and thank god we have the AAA-plus membership that gets them out from as far as 50 miles away. We waited for about an hour for a tow truck, and then we rode in the tow truck cab for nearly an hour to get back into town in Spokane and get dropped off at an O'Reilly Auto Parts store.

The agents at AAA, by the way, kept saying drivers had to practice social distancing and were not allowed to give us rides in their truck. I don't know how often this can really work, especially with people stranded: I tried calling a Lyft but the app tried and failed three times to find a driver, as none where anywhere nearby. How the fuck else were we to get back into town? But, AAA hires out for towing, and that driver, once he got Shobhit on the phone directly, said he would let us ride with him. Shobhit had assured him we had masks, which we did indeed wear the whole way . . . but, the drive himself did not. Even though he had one hanging from a lever in his truck's dashboard.

Now. I sat in the backseat behind Shobhit. I asked Shobhit to roll down his window, and the driver did the same for most of the trip. We were not quite six feet away from him, but probably at least four, as it was a large cab, and Shobhit and I had our masks on. Presumably it was well enough ventilated, even for an hour, that we are fine. Granted, it's a far greater concern if that guy was a carrier, and he's more likely to be if he clearly rarely wears a mask. We're still dealing in probabilities here, though, and between the still-low probability that this guy was a carrier, and the high ventilation with the windows down, we're probably okay. I'll still feel more comfortable after another two weeks have passed.

Anyway. We got to the auto parts store, Shobhit got three containers of coolant, an employee helped him fill the coolant tank, and that actually seemed to solve the problem, although Shobhit did still check under the hood three or four more times the rest of the way home.

Palouse to Cascades State Park Trail

We almost skipped the fourth and last planned state park stop on the way back, having been delayed a couple hours longer than originally expected, but since it was only a 12 minute drive out of the way south of Vantage, Shobhit decided to just stop by it. My desire had been to walk the "Palouse to Cascades State Park Trail" from that trailhead to the Columbia River, but that was roughly one mile, and that was something Shobhit did not want to do—and to be fair, we did save a lot of time by not doing that. I still got a fair number of photos just from the trailhead as well as from the car driving down there and back to Vantage, so all things considered, it's all good. We then drove the rest of the way over the pass and to the Costco in Issaquah again for both filling up and a bathroom break, and we were home right around 8:00—this time having left just about as early again, leaving the Hercules Inn around 8:45 a.m. Not bad, really, with a tow having to be thrown into the mix.

The plan now is to go back next summer. COVID alone would have prevented any Christmastime visit this year, even if Mom were still alive, but with her gone, I'm thinking one visit per year going forward anyway. God knows how long even that will last, as we learned Christopher doesn't much like being that secluded and doesn't want to live in Wallace forever. He also hates bigger cities, even Spokane, anymore; they make him anxious. He doesn't seem to know where he might eventually go. I personally envision him probably still being in Wallace for a while, but, I guess we'll see.

[posted 12:18 pm]